Category Archives: Politics

The other day, I ran across this headline in The Onion: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Of course, the story is about a mass shooting. This story originally ran almost four years ago, but they repost it every time it’s appropriate. I feel like I see it at […]

In the Republic, Plato sets out to answer the question, “What is justice?” Along the way, Socrates* and his interlocutors raise the question of who leads the more pleasant life, the just or the unjust. They bring it to extremes. They assume that the unjust person gets away with it, so to speak. People don’t […]

We are fast approaching an off year election. We are not electing a president or a new congress. That means most people won’t bother to vote and that’s just wrong. Off year elections have a huge impact on our day to day lives. They are when we elect our mayors, our town councils and our […]

As of January 20, 2017, Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. To say I’m scared is an understatement. I’m terrified. Our country has had stupid presidents. We’ve had incompetent presidents. We’ve had evil presidents. This is the first time we’ve had all three in one president. That would be bad enough, […]

There’s a great scene in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where our heroes (Captain Sisko and his officers) are battling the villains (the Jem’Hadar), and offer them the chance to surrender: That phrase, “The order of things,” has stuck with me since I first watched this episode all the way back in 1997. For the Jem’Hadar, […]

It’s so easy to denounce Trump supporters as rabid racists and misogynists. Yet more Hispanic voters cast ballots for Donald Trump than Mitt Romney, despite his anti-Mexican rhetoric. More white women voted for Trump than Hillary Clinton, despite his “Grab them by the pussy” comment. On the left, we continue to ask why. Why are these […]

I want to pose an honest question, one for which I have no answer. Where is the line at which wrong doing should invalidate an election result? Of course we should strive for perfection, but realistically, there has never been a major election without some level of impropriety. We know that, but we accept the […]

Donald Trump was elected as the next president of the United States three days ago. In the days since, we’ve heard the call from political leaders of all stripes to respect our country’s traditions, especially the peaceful transfer of political power. In her remarkable concession speech, Hillary Clinton said, “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful […]

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In my last post, I talked about politics and epistemic confidence. My conclusion was basically that when it comes to political issues, high epistemic confidence is not warranted. That creates a problem. How are we supposed to handle the responsibility of voting if we don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have much confidence in our political […]

Most people, in normal circumstances, get epistemic confidence right. Once we have reached a certain level of maturity, we generally feel confident about the things we know and less confident the less we know. There are things that can get in the way of our epistemic confidence, like harassment, but we usually know what we know and […]